Irish

One of my goals last month was to create a liturgical calendar for the first part of the year which included not only the usual seasons of Lent and Easter that we always celebrate, but also which Saints’ Days we would celebrate because they have special meaning to us. One of the first of those we got a chance to celebrate was my saint I chose at confirmation- St. Brigid. Continue reading →

St. Patrick’s Day Onesie! We figured we’d stick to our Catholic roots instead of trying to pimp the baby by asking strangers to kiss him…

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!! I won’t lie, this is usually a holiday that doesn’t get much attention from me aside from maybe throwing on something green if I have it around. However, when you have a kid you suddenly feel like you better do SOMETHING to mark the big events of the year since the months are flying by so quickly. So I decided I made my little guy a custom onesie and decided I would bake something for the occasion. Why not celebrate a little?

I was originally planning to make green sugar cookies for this week, until I got a brilliant text from a friend telling me I should make Irish Soda Bread for this week’s project. After looking up a few recipes, my first instinct was to say nope, I don’t have the ingredients I need for this and even with the magic of ring slings or other baby carriers, a trip to the grocery store is still a 45 minute venture that I am just not into today. And then I mentally kicked myself. The whole point of the 42 things in 52 weeks part of this blog is to make myself try new things, things I would not normally do! I bake sugar cookies all the time. Bring on the Irish soda bread.

In case you didn’t know- the soda in soda bread refers to baking soda. Not soda pop. Baking soda takes the place of yeast as far as what makes the bread rise!

But I still wasn’t going to the grocery store so… I improvised. After all, what’s more Irish than resourcefulness? (Don’t answer that, I have a feeling
it could get culturally insensitive really fast… someone once told one of my best friends that she looked “as Irish as sadness” true story. Of course, we were living in New York, people just say stuff there…)

For example, I had heard that that instead of buttermilk you can mix regular milk with vinegar. Great… check!

Then recipes called for dried currants or raisins etc. and I had none of those. At first I thought well, it’s optional. Then I remembered- I don’t have what it called for but I DO have trail mix… not the kind with raisins, but there were dried raspberries in there! Those should work, right? same idea…

I used my trusty kitchen aid to whip up this recipe in no time. It’s pretty basic ingredients aside from those two tricky ones I didn’t have in the house. Since the trail mix only yielded me about 1/3 the amount of dried fruit you are supposed to have and the recipe made enough for two loaves, I figured I would make one with the raspberries and one without. Here’s the before and after shots:

Let me just say that of all my baking projects I’ve done so far this year, THIS is the winner for leaving my kitchen smelling AH-MAZING. It probably helped that i took my son outside to play before the AZ weather makes that difficult in the coming weeks, but when I opened the door to check on the bread, I couldn’t help but smile at how good it smelled.

We wanted to try some warm so I sliced off a piece of the larger loaf without dried fruit since i was worried the pieces could be just big enough to pose a choking hazard to my son. He LOVED it, I can’t wait to share some tonight.